How Yakuza and Life is Strange let us revisit their worlds
The places we visit in games are usually one-off affairs; we shoot or puzzle ourselves through a level and are done with it, always impatient to get to the next stage and exciting new sights. Many games recognise that virtual spaces are more than just levels whose walls funnel us through a series of obstacles. They allow us to spend time exploring or simply being in those spaces. Many RPGs, for example, let us return to locations we visited dozens of hours earlier, perhaps subtly changed by the intervening time or our actions. In the Animal Crossing series, the miniature world changes subtly in our absence, and NPCs will even admonish us for staying away for too long.
Usually a virtual place vanishes into the ether once we put away a game. They may continue to exist in our minds, but they're frozen in time; they have no historical dimension. Some virtual places, however, appear to exist in-between games almost independently.
The Legend of Zelda games have always alluded to the lost worlds of former entries through recurring names, musical themes or visual clues. Breath of the Wild takes this a step further by revealing the ruins of structures familiar from earlier games, like Lon Lon Ranch or the Temple of Time, to the diligent player. Nostalgia is as intricately tied to the passage of time as history, so it's no surprise that the two are near indistinguishable in BotW. Not unlike those in Zelda, the events taking place in the Dark Souls series are spread out over millennia, far enough apart that the fact these games are set in the same world isn't immediately apparent. Exploring Irithyll of the Boreal Valley in Dark Souls 3 eventually leads to the realisation we are in fact in a strikingly altered Anor Londo, ascending the same steps we're already familiar from the very first game.
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